On Google Maps: Afghanistan, Brought to You by India

Until a few hours ago, if you logged onto Google Maps and searched for Kabul, Afghanistan, all you’d find were two major intersecting roads and some scattered neighborhood names.

Google

Left, Kabul as seen earlier on Google Maps. Right, Kabul as seen on the new map.

Not much, really.

But that’s all changed. Yesterday, Google unveiled its first detailed map of Afghanistan, drawing on the work of amateur cartographers to highlight a nation that has become one of the world’s major geopolitical flashpoints.

Advertisement

On the new map, Kabul is shown in great specificity, with roads demarcated down to neighborhood blocks and points of interest like parks, schools, hospitals, cafés and embassies.

The new map is the result of Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing: Inputs came from a variety of ordinary Web users who used a tool called Google Map Maker to submit changes to the previous map. Every now and then, Google accepts a large batch of those changes in Google Maps. The Afghanistan update is part of a larger upload of 11 countries and territories.

Map-Maker was invented in Google’s India offices and has since spread to 187 countries, making it one of the best examples of a multinational corporation using India as a laboratory to develop a product with worldwide applications.

Here’s how it works: An aspiring digital-map maker who wants to make some changes to an existing map logs on to Google Map Maker and searches for a location. Using tools provided, the user can draw lines for roads, and shapes for various buildings and landmarks.

Often, especially in hard-to-reach or unstable places like many parts of Afghanistan, users make these edits based on satellite images provided by Google. Google largely relies on the group of cartographers to correct each other, but sometimes it has to intervene.

(Even without any outside suggestions, Google goes to great lengths to avoid border controversies. For instance, it produced separate maps of India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh to appease China’s claim to a portion of the territory and India’s claim to its entirety.)

Putting out detailed, Web-accessible maps of Afghanistan – a country battered by insurgent violence – raises a question: could this help the bad guys find targets more easily?

One of my Wall Street Journal colleagues, who covers Afghanistan and knows Kabul well, wrote to me that it’s “a bit disconcerting to have a detailed map showing where various expat hangouts are located.”

These places aren’t especially hidden, he noted, “but it’s not that comforting to have them located on a Google map.”

(He noted, also, that some popular cafés weren’t accurately pinpointed in the new map.)

In an emailed statement, Google said the benefits of tools like Google Earth and Google Maps “far outweigh any negatives from potential misuse. Google Earth and Maps are built from information that is already available from both commercial and public sources. Google mapping products have been used for vital purposes ranging from fighting forest fires to emergency response to disaster relief.”

Map-maker is responsible for some major additions to Google Maps elsewhere in the region. In India, Google has used the landmarks people enter in Map Maker to improve the driving directions it gives.

The theory is that Indians are much more likely to say, “Take a left after the petrol pump” than, “Go two miles and take a left.”

Some cities have gotten huge makeovers. Take a look at a video of Madurai’s map getting populated.

In Pakistan, users have marked 25,000 kilometers of previously uncharted roads – a huge boon to the government in relief efforts, the company says.

“For that part of the world, it’s been a particularly useful product,” Mr. Marx says.

About India Real Time

India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.